Specialties

Research Focus

Our research focus is to explore emergent phenomena in strongly correlated materials and complex oxide heterostructures, and to understand the underlying mechanisms.

Strongly correlated materials refer to a wide class of materials where the electron-electron Coulomb interaction is large and plays a key role in determining the materials properties. For strongly correlated materials, the interplay among spin, charge and lattice degrees of freedom often lead to exotic phases, such as high Tc superconductor, multiferroics, Mott insulators, etc. On the other hand, by growing different types of complex oxide materials on substrates to form so-call heterostructures, these oxide heterostructures can behave drastically different from bulk counterparts, largely due to the local structural distortions imposed by the epitaxial strain, the interfacial electronic, lattice and orbital reconstructions. This leads to in a variety of remarkable phenomena emerging in oxide heterostructures, such as 2D electron gas, induced superconducting interface, magnetoelectric coupling, etc. Due to the multifunctionality and tunablitity, correlated oxide heterostructures provide an opportunity to study the intriguing physics, design new materials, and may lead to innovative applications.